I Read It In A Book

Sunday Something Seuss Day. New magazines keep being added to the already substantial amount of downloadable material on The Internet Archive. Hey, even this blog is preserved on the Wayback Machine. But also scores of magazine form the forties and fifties, that allow me to look for my favorite cartoonists and illustrators. Here is a selection of short stories Dr. Seuss did for Redbook magazine (which had started as a magazine of adventurous historical stories, but by 1954 had become just another family magazine). I think all of them were reused in one of Dr. Suess' collections of short stories. But the art is sometimes different.

Fumetti Classico

Sunday Italian Classic Day.

 I am a huge fan and collector of Italian master Jacovitti's very funny comic strips. Apart from creaing characters as Cocco Bill and Zorry Kid and illustrtaing classics such as inocchio and the Kama Sutra, he also drew a lot of absurd cartoons and silent gag strips. Hre are some I have ready for posting (with more from Imagao to come). If you follow the link, you will also find a couple of pages from the Domenica del Correira, which I translated and shared here years ago. Many of those have textless gags, too.

 

Here Comes the Sun

Saturday Leftover Day. 

Clark Haas is best known for producing the animation series Clutch Cargo and Space Angel, famous for two things: using life action mouths to capture the moving lips and using designs and art by Alex Toth. Before that, his work could be seen in various comic book series in the fifties, namely the very good looking Kathy from Standard (which I should show sometime). Before that he did a weekly newspaper strip called Sunny Side. I thought I had more copies, but there's what I cam across this morning.

 

Middle of the Jungle

Thursday Animal Lovers Day. 

 I won't say that Reg Bollen's Animal Crackers was the best funny animal strip I ever saw, but Bollen's cowboy strip Catfish was reprinted in one of the weeklys I read as a kid and I have a certain fondness for his limited cartoon inspired style and it does amuse from time to time. So I went and had a look for the first month, which is represented here.

 

The Inconvenient Truth

Wednesday Illustration Day. 

A couple of years ago the American publisher Checker produced a couple of interesting books. The first volume of the complete Scandinavian reprint op Beetle Bailey (taking over the design and the notes and comments from that excellent edition, whch was producent with the help and input of Mort Walker and his sons), a book with the best of the less well known Windsor McCay strips, Flash Gordon, Dick Tracy, Steve Canyon, Alan Moores work on Image's Surpreme title and a book reprinting al lot of McCay's political cartoons. I got them all and they were all disappointing in their own way. Some were printed very badly, some were badly sourced and used second rate scans and all were very badly laid out - except maybe the Beetle Bailey book, which suffered from the fact that it stopped after the first volume (where the Scandinavian series went up to 1980 or so). 

Not long after, Fantagraphics did their own book of McCays political cartoons. Which was a lot better, but concentrated on the art at the detriment of the meaning to my opinion. Now that is a difficult point. The editorials McCay was asked to illustrate were unreadable, like pilitical sermons that seemed intended to sent it's readers to sleep. McCays illustrations were often so alligorical or vague, that they all belended into on gray mess. 

I think that for me, a perfect reprinting of the McCay cartoons would be complete, they would have a short version of the editorial, a historical background and some sort of explaination of the cartoon. Since no one will probably ever do that, here are a couple I clipped earlier.